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"Trivial" usually translates to "frivolous". The big talking point these days is "frivolous lawsuits". Admittedly, each are fuzzy terms, but the more evidence and instances of loss that can be documented, the more substantial the case becomes.
A non-trivial action would be one brought for a tort or a civil rights violation that results in significant financial and legal loss. If a gay couple was denied the right to marry, and one of the partners was in a car accident and left comatose, the other partner would have no say in that person's health care. There has been at least one such case, and it involved the comatose partner's parents being vindictive fundies.
I didn't use the phraseology to deprecate gay marriage -- I used it to make sure it was understood that these actions would be brought for reasons other than taunting the judiciary. Frivolous claims can be dismissed with a wave of the judicial hand, but non-frivolous (non-trivial) filings can't be so easily dismissed without the judge facing an inquiry him or herself.
As to your questions -- here's my best guesses.
#1, you have lost nothing if you were permitted nothing. You would have no claim unless you were legally married and then that marriage was invalidated. Unfair, yes, but that seems to be how it works now.
#2, Shrub didn't break his oath of office by proposing a faith-based amendment, and "the Constitution" in this case is understood to mean the entire United States of America, both real and abstract (as in people and land, philosophy and "honor"). Anybody can propose anything, as the first amendment allows. I don't deny Bush his right to field a religious amendment, but I'll fight it if he does propose it.
Even if the Supreme Court does allow religious laws to stand, chances are they will be overturned within a decade or two. Plessy v. Ferguson enshrined "Separate but Equal" in law, but it was overturned about 60 years later by Brown v. Board of Education which came after several other tries, many of which were partially successful.
The ideal solution, IMHO, would be for the GLBT movement to force the courts to choose between Marriage and Civil Unions as the legal standard, with the idea that Marriage is the religious union and Civil Unions non-religious. You could marry your partner right now, but the legal part of it would be undecided until a Civil Unions law was enacted. The Roman Catholic church could deny the sacrament of Matrimony and it would only be a cause among Catholic reformationists.
As I said, I'm no lawyer, but it seems like these are pretty "fundamental" legal issues in themselves. I'm confused how they became issues for the Godly folks in the first place. It's like the crusade to ban the teaching of evolution in schools -- it has little religious significance, even Fundy kids need to know what the world of science thinks of the idea, and there ought to be bigger issues to fight for. But then again, we're not dealing with rational argument, we're dealing with religion.
300,000 couples with 5 million weighty actions before the courts would "send a message" loud and clear that bigotry, faith-based or otherwise, is un-American.
--bkl
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